"Boxes"

One feature of my book is a wide range of text boxes that contain all sorts of thumbnails about interesting events, issues, and oddities of world economic history since 1800 or so. A list of the titles of the boxes in the published book are included below. Here in this section are skeletal or partial drafts of some boxes that are not in the book (though they may be developed and included in future editions). Enjoy!

If you have thoughts or comments feel free to write me  talltelling@yahoo.com 

Box: Cold War Tourism

Travel between the "Socialist" and "Capitalist" blocs (sometimes referred to as "Eastern" and "Western") was obviously quite restricted, especially during the first decades of the Cold War. Most tourism was thus confined to its respective blocs. In the European Socialist countries, a Polish family could take a holiday in Romania, or East Germany or Hungary...but not in France, Britain or Netherlands, to say nothing of the United States, at least not easily. Movements became somewhat more fluid as the Cold War thawed somewhat, and especially as Eastern bloc countries found an increasing need for the "hard" Western currency that Capitalist country visitors could provide.

An interesting in-between world was present in the Non-Aligned bloc of countries that tried to stand outside either bloc. Yugoslavia was the most prominent example, a Socialist country explicitly independent of Moscow and strategically centered in the Balkans, with many appealing tourist destinations on the Adriatic coast and other locales. East-West links often transited through this country, by Western and Eastern visitors alike.

Box: My meeting with Edward Bernays

When I was an undergraduate student at Brown University back in the early 1980s, I saw this little notice posted up on a campus billboard inviting people to contact a man named Edward Bernays. He lived in up in Cambridge, about an hour's drive north from Providence, Rhode Island, and he wanted students to come visit him at home to hear his wisdom.

So I went. I got a lift from a person I saw on the campus ride-share board (a senior who drove like a mad-man -- I was lucky to have survived the trip) and we both ended up in this cramped room in an upstairs Cambridge apartment with the man himself. At that point he must have been in his 90s (he would live to be over 100) but pretty animated nonetheless. His main advice: make your self an expert in something and sell your expertise. On this he was emphatic. When I expressed some doubt he exclaimed: "No, YOU are the expert!" That was the sort of confidence he demanded.

Of course Bernays was one of the fathers of modern Public Relations. Even at this advanced age he still was carrying his message. And he still craved an audience.

Box: Hollywood and electoral politics

Box: Mau-Mau

Box: Maoist Albania

The Carbarism Project

How to civilize the automobile: http://www.carbarism.org